Asklemmy

I was in American special education in a new school every year until late middle school where I got put on a different 504 plan with checkups throughout the year. I have some type of aphasia so I struggle with speaking and understanding spoken language (though I did greatly improve over the years) so I was in speech therapy from kindergarten to 10th grade (11 years).

It wasn't the worst since I was still good enough to stay in the regular or advanced classes but I'd get pulled every few days for speech therapy which wasn't bad at most of the schools. Since I was being dragged around different rural schools every single year I was usually the only one in speech therapy but there were a few times where there were others with different disabilities but I didn't get to know them since we had to move at the end of the year. The sessions mostly focused on keeping a good internal rhythm and figuring out and practicing ways to get around certain speaking issues I had such as blocks, slurring, and lisp.

All was pretty good until we moved to a suburban hell school for one year where the speech therapist wouldn't even be at the school most of the time so the teachers would just pull me from class and make me sit in an empty room for an hour until someone finds me or I walk back by myself. In the beginning I'd just sit there the entire time but towards the end of the year I'd wait 15 minutes and just walk back to class with the teachers looking confused.

The worst part about everything was being bounced between regular busses and the short bus. I remember in 3rd grade I had lots of friends from the regular bus until the school suddenly forced me to take the short bus quarter way in the year then all of them got distant since I was a now a "short bus kid" except for Lexi; she was the only one that actually stuck with me. Thankfully the teachers were actually pretty good for shutting down any bullying in most of the schools (rare case in American schools) until I got to middle school but by then I was put back exclusively on regular busses and was mostly able to fit in with regular students and we stopped moving around every year so I had a decent social circle so I just had generic middle school bullying.

My 504 plan gave me some extra time and a text to speech reader phone thing (no idea why they thought that was a good idea. Never used it) attached to a special computer for some tests but I opted into just joining the regular test sessions since I had no issues with written language. It was only in one certification test I was forced into the special extended time and text to speech reader session for some ADA compliance reason.

Though one thing I loved was foreign language classes since the teachers were so forgiving on the speaking portions for me so the written portions were the parts I had to fully focus on.

As an adult, the years of speech therapy did give me a really good sense of rhythm so I'm pretty decent at playing instruments without a metronome or other tempo aids. My friends did point out that most of my actions are unusually rhythmic as well such as typing, moving many close objects, chewing, walking, and other repeated tasks where I'd have a strangely consistent rhythm between actions according to them. I never noticed it until they pointed it out but I guess the 11 years of rhythm exercises did that. As for my actual speech, I've gotten considerably better and can mostly function in the real world. Still absolutely abhor giving presentations, video meetings, or phone calls through so I try to do everything over some text or written format.

In college, I have no special treatment so I'm pretty much just a normal student except for being very quiet in class and rarely ever speak unless I have to which hasn't been much of an issue since I do most of my interaction over text, email, or other written/textual formats.